le bookcase girl's or a little echo
girl's. I must be careful to remember them and send them a kiss every
day."

Anne blew a couple of airy kisses from her fingertips past the cherry
blossoms and then, with her chin in her hands, drifted luxuriously out
on a sea of daydreams.

CHAPTER IX. Mrs. Rachel Lynde Is Properly Horrified

Anne had been a fortnight at Green Gables before Mrs. Lynde arrived to
inspect her. Mrs. Rachel, to do her justice, was not to blame for this.
A severe and unseasonable attack of grippe had confined that good lady
to her house ever since the occasion of her last visit to Green Gables.
Mrs. Rachel was not often sick and had a well-defined contempt for
people who were; but grippe, she asserted, was like no other illness on
earth and could only be interpreted as one of the special visitations
of Providence. As soon as her doctor allowed her to put her foot
out-of-doors she hurried up to Green Gables, bursting with curiosity to
see Matthew and Marilla's orphan, concerning whom all sorts of stories
and suppositions had gone abroad in Avonlea.

Anne had made good use of every waking moment of that fortnight. Already
she was acquainted with every tree and shrub about the place. She had
discovered that a lane opened out below the apple orchard and ran up
through a belt of woodland; and she had explored it to its furthest end
in all its delicious vagaries of brook and bridge, fir coppice and wild
cherry arch, corners thick with fern, and branching byways of maple and
mountain ash.

She had made friends with the spring down in the hollow--that wonderful
deep, clear icy-cold spring; it was set about with smooth red sandstones
and rimmed in by great palm-like clumps of water fern; and beyond it was
a log bridge over the brook.

That bridge led Anne's dancing feet up over a wooded hill beyond, where
perpetual twilight reigned under the straight, thick-growing firs and
spruces; the only flowers there were myriads of delicate "June bells,"
those shyest and sweetest of woodland blooms, and a few pale, aerial
starflowers, like the spirits of last year's blossoms. Gossamers
glimmered like threads of silver among the trees and the fir boughs and
tassels seemed to utter friendly speech.

All these raptured voyages of exploration were made in the odd half
hours which she was allowed for play, and Anne talked Matthew and
Marilla half-deaf over her discoveries. Not that Matthew complained, to
be sure;